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Toning shoes are shoe that make the muscles in the foot and leg work harder and change the gait and the posture. They do that by having a rocker under the sole. They are controversial due to legal action taken against the companies by the FDA over the lack of science to support the health gains for the shoes. If you are going to make health claims for a product, then you probably need some evidence to back it up. The difference between the evidence and the hype over the claims is what leads to the skepticism. The most well known shoes in this category are the MBT’s, the Skechers Shape Up and the Reebok Easy Tones.

Will they help those with fibromyalgia?

In all honesty I really have no idea. They will change the posture and the alignment and problems with these are common in fibromaylgia. As to if the postural change induced by using these toning shoes is positive or negative for any individual is hard to say. For some it will be a positive change and for others it will be a negative change. We have no guidelines or tools to help us predict in advance who they might help.

More research is certainly needed and I see them being very helpful to some people with fibromyalgia. It is just the lack of research on it is what the problem is (and what got the companies in trouble with the authorities!). My best advice is, they are probably worth a try.

Fibromyalgia is characterized by chronic and extended musculoskeletal pain. The combination of exercise therapy with the warm water may be an appropriate treatment. However, studies focusing on the analysis of immediate pain during and after an exercise session are rare. This study aimed to determine the immediate changes of a warm water pool-based exercise program (12 weeks) on pain (before vs. after session) in female fibromyalgia patients. 33 Spanish women with fibromyalgia were selected to participate in a 12 weeks (2 sessions/week) low-moderate intensity warm water pool-based program. We assessed pain by means of a Visual Analogue Scale before and after each single session (i. e., 24 sessions). We observed immediate benefits on pain with a mean decrease ~15% in all sessions, except in the fourth one. There was an association of pain difference (pre-post) session with pain pre session (p=0.005; β=0.097±0.034) and with age (p<0.001; β=0.032±0.008). There were no significant accumulative differences on pain, pre session, post session, and pre-post changes (all p>0.05). Therefore this study showed that a warm water pool-based exercise program for 12 weeks (2 times/week) led to a positive immediate decrease in level of pain in female patients with fibromyalgia. Improvements were higher in older women and in those with more intense pain.

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Fibromyalgia is a complex illness to diagnose and to treat. There is not yet a diagnostic test to establish that someone has it, there is no cure and many fibromyalgia symptoms — pain, fatigue, problems sleeping and memory and mood issues — can overlap with or get mistaken for other conditions. A new Mayo Clinic study suggests that many people who have fibromyalgia, especially men, are going undiagnosed. The findings appear in the online edition of the journal Arthritis Care & Research.

More research is needed, particularly on why men who reported fibromyalgia symptoms were less likely than women to receive a fibromyalgia diagnosis, says lead author Ann Vincent, M.D., medical director of Mayo Clinic’s Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Clinic.

“Health care providers may not think of this diagnosis when face to face with a male patient with musculoskeletal pain and fatigue,” Dr. Vincent says. “These findings need to be explored further.”

Researchers focused on Olmsted County, Minn., home to a comprehensive medical records pool known as the Rochester Epidemiology Project, and used multiple methods to try to get at the number of people over age 21 with fibromyalgia.

They used the epidemiology project to identify just over 3,000 patients who looked like they might have fibromyalgia: Roughly a third had a documented fibromyalgia diagnosis. That amounted to 1.1 percent of the county’s population 21 and older.

In the second method, researchers randomly surveyed Olmsted County adults using the American College of Rheumatology’s fibromyalgia research survey criteria. The criteria include the hallmarks of fibromyalgia: widespread pain and tenderness, fatigue, feeling unrested after waking, problems with memory or thinking clearly and depression or anxiety, among other symptoms. Of the 830 who responded to the survey, 44, or 5.3 percent, met those criteria, but only a dozen had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

Based on the study’s findings, the researchers estimate that 6.4 percent of people 21 and older in Olmsted County have fibromyalgia — far more than have been officially diagnosed with it.

Fibromyalgia is more common in women, but men can get it too. The discrepancy between the number of people reporting fibromyalgia symptoms and the number actually diagnosed with the condition was greatest among men, the study found. Twenty times more men appeared to have fibromyalgia based on their survey response than had been diagnosed, while three times more women reported fibromyalgia symptoms than were diagnosed.

“It is important to diagnose fibromyalgia because we have effective treatments for the disorder,” says co-author Daniel Clauw, M.D., director of the University of Michigan Health System Chronic Pain & Fatigue Research Center.

Studies also show that properly diagnosing people with fibromyalgia reduces health care costs, because they often need far less diagnostic testing and fewer referrals looking for the cause of their pain, Dr. Clauw says.

Middle-aged and older women with sleep problems are at greater risk

Researchers from Norway have uncovered an association between sleep problems and increased risk of fibromyalgia in women. The risk of fibromyalgia increased with severity of sleep problems, and the association was stronger among middle-aged and older women than among younger women. Results of the prospective study, based on ten years of data, appear in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR).

Experts estimate that fibromyalgia — a chronic musculoskeletal pain syndrome — affects more than 5 million people over the age of 18 in the U.S., with the general adult population prevalence at 3% to 5%. Studies have shown that the syndrome onset typically occurs in middle age and up to 90% of those with fibromyalgia are women. While previous research has found that insomnia, nocturnal awakening, and fatigue are common symptoms in patients with fibromyalgia, it is unknown whether poor sleep habits contribute to the development of this pain syndrome.

Drs. Paul Mork and Tom Nilsen from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) investigated the impact of sleep problems on risk of fibromyalgia in a population of women in Norway. Female participants aged 20 and older who had participated in a large population-based health study (the HUNT study; http://www.ntnu.edu/hunt) by answering a health-related questionnaire and undergoing clinical examination were included in the investigation. The researchers selected 12,350 women who were free of musculoskeletal pain and movement disorders for the current study.

“Our findings indicate a strong association between sleep disturbance and fibromyalgia risk in adult women,” said Dr. Mork. “We found a dose-response relation, where women who often reported sleep problems had a greater risk of fibromyalgia than those who never experienced sleep problems.”

Results show that at follow-up, 327 women had developed fibromyalgia — representing an incidence proportion of 2.6% during 10 years. The adjusted relative risk for women who reported having sleep problems “often” or “always” was 5.41 among women over 45 years of age and 2.98 among those between 20 and 44 years. The authors suggest that further studies are needed to investigate whether early detection and treatment of sleep disturbance reduces the risk of fibromyalgia in women.